Go to Penguin Visual Design Process
Is there a correlation between body mass and culmen lenght in the three species of penguins?
Of the three species of penguins, how do their body masses compare?
I choose a penguin size dataset from Kaggle because of a recent zoo trip with the family! In this dataset, there are 3 types of penguins and the body size and culmen size attributes. I knew I wanted to look at the overall comparison of the sizes of the penguins and the determination or correlation of their body size and culmen length to see which penguins had the overall bigger body or culmen lenght size. I decided to come up with the questions that I wanted to be able to answer with the visualizations I wanted to create.
Question 1: Is there a correlation between body mass and culmen lenght in the three species of penguins? and Question 2: Of the three species of penguins, how do their body masses compare?
I wanted the user of the visual to be able to look through the data points and visibly be able to tell which length of culmen and body mass belonged to which type of penguin. I originally thought that I wanted to work with “cold” colors because of the penguin’s habitat, but I realized that the colors may not be too visibly distinguishable and not easily seen by the eye. I decided to use three completely different colors so that you can, at a quick glance decide which penquin type is which based on the legend provided as well. I used Red for the Adelie penguin, green or the chinstrap penguin and blue for the Gentoo penguin. When first jotting down ideas for which direction I wanted the visual to go, I thought I may want a bar chart but switched to a scatter plot because I believe it is easier to see the correlation and all of the data as a whole and comparison. I wanted the viewer to be able to select which penguin types to compare and when you click on the circle icon in the legend corresponding to which penguin types you want to use you can “select” penguin types to compare which in turn loads the corresponding data onto the scatterplot depending on your selection. With the second scatter plot, I tried to encorporate a drop down selection option that I do not think was successful. You can toggle across, scan, zoom in and out of the data on the scatter plot. As you hover over a data point it readily shows you the data corresponding to that point.
With the scatterplots that I created I know that the penguin with the largest body mass is that of a Gentoo with a body mass of 6300 g. In comparison- the Gentoo has a tendency to be a larger penguin than the Adelie and Chinstrap which appear to be more comparable in size. The smallest body mass from the dataset is that of the Chinstrap Penguin with 2700g in body mass.
It appears that there is a positive correlation between the body mass of penguins and their culmen length. According to the scatter plot, as the body mass increases it appears that the culmen length also increases- and this is similar with all types of the 3 penguins studied by this dataset.
Video link: https://youtu.be/zmUOXSHnfrg